Apple issues MobileMe apology, adds 30 days to existing subscriptions

Apple has issued a formal apology to MobileMe users not only for the rocky start to the new service, but also for using the word “push” to describe the MobileMe service when it does not, in fact, push to your Mac.

You can read the full email below.

In spite of all this, people are still reporting quite a few problems with MobileMe. I have noticed an issue where email that I send isn’t arriving for hours, and sometimes not at all. Others have reporting syncing problems, multiple copies of email, email not deleting, and more.

Comments

i am having some serious problems with contacts syncing with mobileme. Only about half of my contacts are showing up on the mobile me page and on my iPhone, and of these contacts, none have phone numbers. I have found no record of anyone else having this problem and I hope it is an isolated incident that the Apple support team can help me straighen it out.

I let the Geniuses at the Genius Bar “personalize” my iPhone on Friday. When I left everything was on my iPhone and working fine. When I got home and synced with my Mac for the first time I suddenly had 2 of all of my calendar appointments and contacts. I went into the PUSH options on my iPhone, turned off the MobileMe account, went back to the Home screen, checked Calendar and Contacts to make sure they were empty – which the were – then turned the PUSH services back on. Everything has been fine ever since.

I was a little shocked to see that Apple issued that email this morning. I got it as well. I’ll gladly take the extra 30 days, but I don’t see a 15 – 30 minute delay in delivery to my computer being a reason to issue an apology.

After the bumpy start I’ve actually been pretty pleased with my MobileMe experience, the small sync delay to/from my Mac isn’t a big issue and the mail application has been working well but isn’t my primary email address. The PUSH from phone to cloud and back again has been almost immediate, and pretty cool too!

I’ve had loads of problems getting it to sync up from my Exchange based work PC… I can sync down but not up and as such I’m on the verge of giving up (especially as I now have exchange set up on my phone). There seem to be lots of people with Exchange that are having sync problems though.

I see the sync problems as a bigger issue than the 15 min delay too. If I could work out how to get my Hotmail to ‘push’ to my phone I probably wouldn’t have any need for MobileMe at all now.

Since upgrading to MobileMe 2.0 on my iPhone and having current updates on all three (3) of my Mac computers, the synching has worked good. I had lots of issues with synching before MobileMe and spend many hours getting it resolved with Tech Support. I was glad to see nothing was affected by the upgrade to 2.0. However, the new problem is my email to and from my iPhone. I have to completely shut down my iPhone 4 or 5 times a day and reboot it to get it to connect and pull my emails. I also have to do the same in order to get emails to send from my iPhone. I had no such problems before the 2.0 upgrade. I use 2 POP3 accounts in addition to my .Mac address and all are affected the same by this issue. It’s almost like my iPhone can’t connect to the data services consistently and a reboot establishes the connection until lost periodically throughout the day.